Removing most inline styles and properties with PHP

Question

This question is related to a similar case, namely http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2488950/removing-inline-styles-using-php

The solution there does not remove i.e: <font face="Tahoma" size="4">

But let's say I have a mixed bag of inline styles and properties, like this:

<ul style="padding: 5px; margin: 5px;">
    <li style="padding: 2px;"><div style="border:2px solid green;">Some text</div></li>
    <li style="padding: 2px;"><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" size="2">Some text</font></li>
    <li style="padding: 2px;"><font face="arial,helvetica,sans-serif" size="2">Some text</font></li>  
</ul>

What regExp is needed to achieve this result?

<ul>
    <li><div>Some text</div></li>
    <li><font>Some text</font></li>
    <li><font>Some text</font></li>  
</ul>

Thanks for reading the question, any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

As usual, regex isn't ideal for parsing HTML; it's very possible you'd be better off with an actual HTML parser.

That said...

$noattributes = preg_replace('/<(\w+) [^>]+>/', '<$1>', $original);

...will replace any opening tags that contain attributes with the corresponding tag w/o attributes. It might, however, accidentally also hit "tags" that are contained within quoted attributes of other tags (and thus not actually tags themselves). It will also cause problems with self-closing tags (it'll replace <br /> with <br>) - though this can be avoided if the self-closing tags don't have a space between the tag name and the slash.